stuaxo7 hours ago
This whole thing of private equity + companies getting massively inflated - only ends one way, it might not be this this buyer but one down the line, but there is something deeply wrong with the whole model, the one that starts with startups such as those funded by ycombinator.
Incipient6 hours ago
The point being someone is left holding the bag?

That's potentially true, but not necessarily. I haven't looked into this particular case, however it's entirely possible that a lot of the EU have started divesting from Windows and into suse, which has caused a big spike in revenue here.

Or its PE doing PE things and it's all a farce.

pocksuppet6 hours ago
Nobody uses SuseLinux any more. If SUSE gets 6 billion dollars and a private equity firm gets nothing valuable, there's nothing wrong with that.
bruce5115 hours ago
By "nobody" I presume you mean you and your friends? From the article;

>> "More than 60% of the Fortune 500 rely on SUSE to power some of their workloads, according to the company."

This is an Enterprise version of Linux, and unless you are in the enterprise space you're unlikely to come across it.

Also from the article; >> "The company generates about $800 million in revenue "

So again, this suggests that people are indeed using it.

tempest_5 hours ago
Rancher/k3s is used a lot in many places as well.
Xylakant3 hours ago
There’s also harvester on top of rancher. It’s one of the very few open source competitors to RedHats OpenShift that I’m aware of.

I mostly like their use of an immutable OS as base layer for the virtualization - despite the limitations it sometimes has.

hhh1 hour ago
Harvester is just Kubevirt with some UI atop it, the same as Redhat Virt. Works fine if you’re hosting datacenters or whatever, haven’t seen it be suitable in smaller manufacturing environment
alfiedotwtf2 hours ago
Over 60% are SUSE?! Sorry, but I’m with everyone else…

I remember since the start that SUSE was more popular in Europe, but no way would that be the case in the US. If anything, I’d be willing to put my money on > 60% of Linux installs being RHEL/Centos rather than SUSE

grundrausch3n1 hour ago
You could get the number wrong. The quote stated that 60% of the companies use Suse to power some of the workloads. So if most of these companies would use Suse to host SAP, some have a few teams using Rancher and some (more so in Europe ) are using Sles you still get to these numbers even if most of them use RedHat for most of their workloads.
LiamPowell5 hours ago
> Nobody uses SuseLinux any more.

What gives you that impression? They had $700MM in revenue in 2022 and many HPC clusters run on Cray OS[1] (which is SLES).

> If SUSE gets 6 billion dollars

Not how sales work.

[1]: https://top500.org/statistics/list/

AshamedCaptain51 minutes ago
SuSE is about the 2nd most used distro in the enterprise, and I can understand why.
steve19773 hours ago
It's still quite popular with SAP shops here in Europe at least. And I could imagine that the strong anti-American sentiment in Europe plays in its favor.
ahsillyme5 hours ago
Interesting. It's the only commercial distro I could ever stomach, in fact I really like it but don't use it, (because there's a non-commercial distro that I like much more). (Edit: my point was that it would feel like a real loss if it were to deteriorate)
weitzj3 hours ago
Maybe for your personal workstation this might be the experience you have. But from my experience for enterprise there is RHEL, Suse and maybe Ubuntu Pro. If you are an AWS Enterprise customer you might justify Amazon Linux
JSR_FDED4 hours ago
TIL SuSE does $800m revenue per year
kdamica4 hours ago
What does ‘enterprise Linux’ actually mean? Not asking snarkily; I’m curious what the main differences are between this and other Linux distros. Is it mostly about getting good tech support?
ehnto3 hours ago
Yeah it's about support contracts, which covers a lot of services actually such as maintaining security audited package repositories. But most importantly it's about support life cycles you can rely on for a long term investment of time and infrastructure outlays.

For example, RHEL 10 has a planned support phase out until 2035, with extended support available until 2038.

They do tend to have a different goal for their intial installation and configuration to consumer distros, with a focus on security and providing tools you will need in an enterprise hosting environment.

blinding-streak3 hours ago
Color me shocked that SUSE was worth 6 billion. Good for them.